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Which factors contribute to a state’s decision to intervene militarily in a civil war? In May 2005, the President of Germany and former managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Horst Köhler, was sitting in a plane on his way back to Germany after a brief visit of German troops in Masar-I-Sharif in Afghanistan. A journalist asked Köhler about his views concerning the domestic political discourse and the justification of military interventions abroad. Köhler responded that a country of Germany’s size ought to use military power to maintain free trading routes and support regional stability in cases when disruptions threaten its economic interests.1 Ten days later, Köhler announced his resignation. During those ten days, critiques from government and opposition alike commented that Köhler’s statements were unconstitutional and contradicted Germany’s rationale to deploy soldiers abroad only for security reasons but not for economic interests.
Just a couple of years later, Germany participated in one of the largest maritime missions at the Horn of Africa to protect trading routes against Somali pirates. The Somali Civil War, which had lasted since the 1990s, was hardly of geostrategic concern for most countries in the world. This mindset swiftly changed in the 2000s, when Somali piracy surged and jeopardized international maritime routes near the Gulf of Aden and the Horn of Africa. Faced with increasing insurance premiums for shipping and risks for the safe passage of goods between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed several resolutions.2 Germany joined the naval mission Combined Task Force 151 under the leadership of the United States to curb Somali pirates and protect merchant ships. Participating states also included Spain, Italy, Pakistan, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Singapore, and Thailand. Additionally, countries such as China and Russia, independently but cooperatively, operated against pirates, while the European Union (EU) created its own naval mission, Atalanta. The missions had no intentions to solve the causes of the Somali Civil War and instead solely dealt with its economic consequences on international trade.
How can we explain this apparent contradiction between the negative public reaction to Köhler’s economic justification of military operations and Germany’s subsequent participation in a global naval mission designed to protect its national and economic interests? In brief, this book provides two arguments to address the apparent paradox of adverse public sentiment on military interventions and policymakers’ contradictory decision-making. The first argument relates to the use of military power to protect, but not advance, economic interests abroad, while the second argument directs attention to the existence of proxy interventions when great powers harness smaller powers to intervene in civil wars. Central to the argumentation is the role played by foreign direct investments (FDI) and arms trade. Existing FDI in a civil war country induces risk-prone behavior for the purpose of protection. At the same time, arms trade between a permanent member (P-5) of the UNSC and an arms recipient creates a relationship that increases the recipient country’s likelihood to intervene in civil wars on behalf of the arms exporting country. Both FDI and arms trade entail a transformative effect on the propensity to intervene militarily in a civil war.
The Combined-Task Force mission represents a trend where the primary reasoning behind the protection of private economic interests shifted from interstate to intrastate conflicts. Until the Hague Conference in 1907, it was a recognized practice of the United States and European states to support domestic private creditors when foreign countries defaulted on their outstanding debts.3 France intervened militarily in Mexico in 1838 (and again in 1861 together with Spain and Great Britain) to collect arrears on behalf of privateers. In 1902, Great Britain and Germany intervened in Venezuela with the consent of the Roosevelt administration for the same reason.4 However, with the conclusion of the second Hague Conference, European powers renounced military interventions and focused on diplomatic instruments. Finnemore describes it thus: ‘’Creditors and capital markets generally have developed more elaborate methods of collateralizing, rescheduling, and collecting foreign loans. But states seeking to collect foreign debts no longer consider military force an option.”5
After the Second World War, the international community has experienced new challenges with the proliferation of intrastate conflicts and their consequences for economic well-being. Collier et al.6 find that countries experiencing civil wars undergo a substantial decline in GDP per capita, and Kibiris7 shows that internal violence entails lasting effects on educational attainment. The term “conflict trap” has become a catchword to denote the harmful effects of long-lasting and intensive civil wars for post-conflict recovery. One corollary of domestic fighting is the destruction of property financed by international investors. As observed by Collier et al.:8 “during the war rebel forces target physical infrastructure as part of their strategy. The main targets are the enemy’s communication and support lines, such as telecommunications, airports, ports, roads, and bridges. In addition to this strategic destruction of key infrastructure, rebels and government soldiers loot and destroy housing, schools, and health facilities.”
Infrastructure projects, telecommunication networks, or natural resources extraction sites in conflict-affected countries are frequently funded by international investors as the lack of available capital in poor states requires an inflow of FDIs.9 Therefore, corporations with investments in unstable regions face the unpredictability of the security of their assets either through destruction or expropriation,10 as well as a decline in available human capital to maintain business due to internal armed unrest.11 Firms with direct exposure to such violence are forced to relocate their movable investments.12 This observation raises the following two questions. First: considering the steady rise of FDI to developing countries since the first half of the 1990s, can we observe an increased willingness of states to protect private investors’ investments at risk using military means? Second: are increasing levels of economic and military interdependencies between states affecting the propensity to intervene militarily in civil wars?
The theme of this book
As both questions indicate, this book’s theme concerns the factors that increase the propensity of a state to intervene militarily in a civil war. The term “military intervention” in this book not only encompasses the participation of a country with combat forces, but also includes financial, logistic, intelligence, or other types of indirect support to a conflict actor. The book contributes to current debates concerned with economic factors behind military interventions as well as debates interested in the delegation of interventions to other actors such as in coalition interventions or in interven...
